Amoeba Review

Brad Schelden, Hollywood 12/07/2012

The Liars have been around for about 12 years now. This is their sixth album. I have always been a fan of this band. Some years more than others. I do love that this band keeps managing to reinvent themselves. This new album is sort of a dark electronic gospel record. It reminds me at times of Spiritualized or The Tindersticks with heavy electronics. I am happy to have this band back in my life. They have created another great album for us to enjoy. WIXIW is pronounced "Wish You" in case you were wondering.

06/05/2012

Liars throw their fans another curveball with WIXIW, a largely electronic album and a huge departure from their last two albums, Sisterworld and self-titled, which both funneled their noise into more easily digestible (if still twisted) pop tunes. But this also isn’t They Were Wrong, So We Drowned, their highly divisive second album, which was based more on drone and ambiance than songwriting. WIXIW is somewhere in between, pop in the way the Silver Apples or Portishead’s Third are pop, equal parts sinister and beautiful, with a throbbing heart underneath its digital beats. The album begins on a lightly ambient note with “The Exact Color of Doubt” before moving into “Octagon,” which has all of the qualities of some of Liars’ best songs. It’s disturbing, atonal at parts, yet its whole is instantly memorable, sticking mean hooks into you that feel better than they should. “No. 1 Against the Rush” sends goth down the autobahn, playing out like a krautrock variation on The Cure’s “A Forest.” WIXIW has already been compared to Radiohead’s Kid A, and, listening to the title track — which disintegrates eerily under waves of oscillators and comes pulsing back for a haunting chanted chorus — it’s not hard to see why. Liars make the most alien of sounds feel intimate and painfully human.